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Topic: New Descent (Underground) Trailer (Read 324 times)

I've gotten the impression that in light of Overload, Descent Underground has become old news and no longer of too much interest around here, but I figured I might as well share this with everybody anyway.

Link (<---I'd embed the video directly, but I can't for the life of me recall how to do so on this site currently)

In case you missed it, Descendant Studios joined forces with Little Orbit not so long ago (enabling them to provide cross-platform support, even for consoles), and have since then been busy buckling down and getting the game ready for a formal, final release. According to their recent blog posts and as you'll see in the trailer, they've made a lot of progress in building a singleplayer campaign, further refining multiplayer and the overall game, and have also dropped the "Underground" subtitle, dubbing the final game just "Descent." They've begun pitching it almost as if it's meant to be seen as a reboot now, but we'll see.

They say they are gearing up to releasing alpha/beta versions for testing to Kickstarters, early-access buyers, etc. "later this month," so if you fall into one of those categories (such as myself), you'll be seeing that shortly (in fact, you've probably already gotten news about all of this, but in case you haven't...) A full commercial release is planned to follow sometime before 2018 is out.

There was footage of the game at E3. It's certainly changed a bit, but the most common complaint is directed at the flight model and hit boxes. We don't know anything about the singleplayer yet, so it'll be interesting to see their take on it.

One thing that Overload lacks is game modes for interesting multiplayer (Anarchy and TA are kinda boring for me tbh). D:U will have like 18 modes or something, so maybe we'll have a D3-Like multiplayer era again with big CTF matches and the like? (here's hoping...)

DU (or I guess D2018 now) certainly has been much more multiplayer focused in its development, but I know from seeing how it went for other games that multiplayer only goes so far. And I know the game's gotten flak for that from among at least Descenters too. It's put so much attention on its multiplayer which it readily demonstrates all the time that its singleplayer campaign that it's been oh-so quiet about by comparison feels more of an afterthought, and that doesn't sit well with some. And seeing it's had Overload to compete with, I worry all that isn't going to win over enough players.

But we'll see.

At the very least, I know Descendant's rights to Descent basically amounts to just the name (thanks for that, Interplay) so there's a limited amount they can recreate due to legal reasons...but I still say that, despite that, they could've tried harder to closer emulate at least the visual style of Descent. Instead, the game always has, and judging from that trailer, still will, felt like it's...overthinking...it a bit. Part of what made Descent great was that, save for the flight controls (6DOF and all that), Descent always was pretty straightforward in mechanics, even in D3's objective-based gameplay.

I had pretty much written this one off as vaporware; albeit vaporware that I had a lot of fun duking it out with the community in EA.

If the single-player campaign is solid, I'm looking forward to it - because it's multiplayer is completely dead. Creating and maintaining a critical mass of players is incredibly difficult in such a niche genre, and 18 game modes is positively absurd for a game that likely doesn't even have 18 players log on to check for activity each month.

Revival was wise to put so much emphasis on a solid single player campaign for Overload, and even more so with the challenge mode, which essentially has a multiplayer conponent in the form of leaderboards, which doesn't require any concurrent activity for people to compete with each other. If D:U includes a throwaway 2-hour campaign solely to introduce players to mechanics useful for multiplayer, it simply won't succeed.

Logged

I, for one, hope this is much, much more than a reconnaissance mission.

To be fair: Overload multiplayer isn't exactly bustling either. And the version of the game currently out there is the early access one, so you can't really claim that multiplayer is dead at this point until we've seen the launched product.

The problem Overload had and still has to this day is branding. I've met countless people who don't even know about Overload, but they've all heard about the new Descent game coming out this year. It's a shame to be honest, Overload is such a good game. Unfortunately this might be a problem for player retention if D:U turns out to be crap.

If the single-player campaign is solid, I'm looking forward to it - because it's multiplayer is completely dead. Creating and maintaining a critical mass of players is incredibly difficult in such a niche genre, and 18 game modes is positively absurd for a game that likely doesn't even have 18 players log on to check for activity each month.

Yeah, that's largely what I'm worried about, that, as fun as it is, it's not actually the multiplayer that's what interests players and that it will prove unwise for Descendant to have put as much focus on it as they did. To be honest, I feel Descendant put their focus on a lot of the wrong things throughout building the game, which pains me to say--the crew seem like great guys who genuinely want to produce a quality game living up to the Descent legacy. To think that they might not succeed still despite everything seems sad.

But we are jumping the gun a little. DU's not formally out yet, and none of us have seen much of anything of the new beta either, so until we do, a lot of this will remain as just speculation. At least it seems we won't have to wait for much longer to see for ourselves.

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The problem Overload had and still has to this day is branding. I've met countless people who don't even know about Overload, but they've all heard about the new Descent game coming out this year. It's a shame to be honest, Overload is such a good game. Unfortunately this might be a problem for player retention if D:U turns out to be crap.

For much this reason, I still maintain it was a mistake marketing-wise for either game to be announced or released in such close proximity to each other, because whether they meant to or not, it brought both into competition with each other, and worse still, both are claiming to be flying the flag that will continue the Descent legacy after so long an absence, leaving it wide open for the fanbase to get up in arms over which one is most "worthy" of that flag. Either way, it split the fanbase's attention when both games really needed to be in position to collect most to all of it at a time. You can't have that with two games vying for one's attention at pretty much the same time.

It's helped some that DU went quiet for awhile for more development while Overload happened to be making its release, but I think that also allowed some its fanbase to get distracted by Overload and may no longer be willing to come back to DU. Or worse had, like D2Disciple, forgotten about it and will miss the release altogether. In fact, from what I've seen, a lot of players who were at first all on board with DU seem to have, by now, lost most to all interest in the game. They don't seem to have nearly as many followers as they once did back at the start of things at least.